music

This is part 3 of a journey through my Spotify profile. If you haven’t, check out part 1 and part 2.

After albums comes a weird folder named Curated. A while back, presumably bummed out about not being at Glastonbury, I decided to organise an online festival. For a week, I encouraged my friends to make Spotify playlists representing the stage of their choice, and to my surprise, they listened. Spotstock ran for three years, producing wonders such as The Trouser Tent, The Martini Roso Stage, The Dubstep Room and At The Movies. I keep every Spotstock year in a folder. For a long time, I ran a small webapp displaying them all, but that’s gone now. Perhaps I should get it back online.

Finally, I have my monthly playlists. I can’t remember why I started this. It was definitely after I saw a friend do it, but I’m not sure who. It’s become my way of trying to recreate the way I used to listen to music. In the good old days, I would buy CDs and stack them up next to my CD player - that stack would rotate slowly and I’d listen to those same albums over and over. After a while, I’d get bored of them and they’d enter the rack, to be replaced by another album - sometimes old, sometimes new. By listening to the same albums over and over, I gained a deeper understanding of them. With the advent of streaming music, it’s too easy to flow from one album to the next, never really listening to the same thing twice. The unit of music that is the album has been pushed into the background by our current music climate. To counter this somewhat, I keep a monthly playlist of anything I’m listening to - if I like it, I stick it on the list. I have no other rules - some albums crop up month after month, sometimes I put a lot of music in there, sometimes I have very little. There is rarely any coherence. It’s not an ideal solution, as I often neglect to actually look at the monthly playlist, but it’s something. For example, my working music this month has been very varied. January 2017 was a slightly more themed month in which I was on a bit of a riot grrl binge. December 2010 kicks off with the soundtrack to The Matrix - what a find! I’ve been doing this since September 2010.

This is part 2 of a journey through my Spotify profile. If you haven’t, check out part 1.

Moving on, I have a folder of collaborative playlists. I can’t link any of these, as they’re semi-private, but among them I have Our Favourite Songs, which a group of us started some time prior to 2010. I have no idea how many people have looked at it over the years. We add things to it now and then. It is now 40 hours long, containing 619 songs. The quality of songs on there is extremely variable. I also have three related playlists from my friend Darren, who, upset at the lack of Boards of Canada on Spotify (mercifully rectified today), asked for our help in finding music that is “Like Boards of Canada”, “Not Quite Like Boards of Canada”, and “Not Like Boards of Canada”. They remain an excellent resource.

I have a folder called Albums, which is largely redundant now that Spotify keeps better track of albums you listen to. Not much to report here, but I’m going to link you to Envy’s Set Yourself on Fire, because it’s good and you should listen to it, and Gescom’s Mini Disc, because it’s a fascinating concept album that you’ve probably never heard of.

I’ve been using Spotify for a long time. I’m not 100% sure when I started using it, but it launched in 2008 and when I gave out invites to my friends, one of them took a 2 character username, so I guess it must have been 2008 or 2009. I have been using playlists from the start - I even have collaborative playlists from before they stored the date in which each song was added. Deep in all of this, there are some real gems, so I thought I’d dive through them and dig some up.

At the top of my playlists I have Spotify’s Discover Weekly, which is always good for new music hunting, and my Starred playlist. Starring songs went away for quite sensible reasons sometime after 2013, but my starred songs still represent an excellent selection of my favourite music.

After that, everything’s in folders. I remember when playlist folders arrived in Spotify - it was a very, very good day.

I have an “offline” folder that I rotate things through, to make it easy to track them on my phone and quickly download them. A lot of stuff rolls through here, depending on my mood, but right now, my Holiday mix is all that’s in there worth mentioning.